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Embracing the Beloved is the name of a musical concert rooted in Sephardic, Persian, and North and South Indian cultural traditions. Co-creators Nirmala Rajasekar, David Jordan Harris, and Maryam Yusefzadeh recently performed three shows in the Twin Cities. This program was recorded and produced for KFAI by Daniel Zamzow.

DJ Baby Swiss goes solo in a seasonal stylee…as Dr. StrangeDub was out of town for Christmas. Highlights include “A Long Wintry Sigh,” Likkle Mai’s contribution to “Reggae with Snow Lovers,” a companion volume to “Reggae with Xmas Lovers” that makes its Echo Chamber debut this week. Also turning up is Fred Schneider’s B-52s side-project The Superions, twice, from “Destination… Christmas!” And look for usual suspects Jah Iriest, Peter Broggs, Joe Gibbs, The Aggrovators and Granville Williams peppering the playlist with the Yard Christmas classics we all remember. So don’t let all the crap the world throws at you stop you from having some fun at its expense. As Pauline Black and The Selecter say, “Skank ‘til Christmas!”

Lynette reads poems and headnotes from the 1869 collection Christmas with the Poets, a scholarly collection published in London of the earliest known English poems associated with Christmas up to the 1860s. They include: Anglo Saxon Carols, Boar's Head Carols, In Praise of Ale, several Shakespeare poems and several Holly and Ivy Poems.

We also visit with Amy Tan – a rebroadcast of her interview with Ian, in which she discusses her newest book The Valley of Amazement.

Today’s show incorporated Ellen Stanley’s Women Folk so Rollin & Tumblin actually lasted 4 and a half hours today instead of 2 and a half. In honor of the season, I played party music to help folks complete all the holiday tasks they had yet to do. So instead of holiday music, and instead of taking the A-Train today, folks got to ride on the KFAI Soul Train.

Robyn Cruze says, “I gave my soul to my eating disorder. I truly believed that I would die from my illness as so many do. I felt my hearts being tarnished by the dictates of it. I was sinking along with the dreams and purpose I once had. I was treading in the deep end of life with only my nostrils above the waterline. Like the caterpillar that never came out of its cocoon, I was lost in the darkness of isolation. Never to become the butterfly that God intended me to be, that is until recovery”.